Cave Paintings in Indonesia May Be Among the Oldest Known

There is nothing like a blank stone surface to inspire a widely shared urge to make art.

A team of researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday that paintings of hands and animals in seven limestone caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi may be as old as the earliest European cave art.

The oldest cave painting known until now is a 40,800-year-old red disk from El Castillo, in northern Spain.

Other archaeologists of human origins said the new findings were spectacular and, in at least one sense, unexpected. Sulawesi’s cave art, first described in the 1950s, had previously been dismissed as no more than 10,000 years old.

“Assuming that the dates are good,” Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, said in an email, “this is good news, and the only surprising thing is not that analogous finds would exist elsewhere, but rather that it has been so hard to find them” until now.

Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College of the City University of New York, agreed that the discovery “certainly makes sense.” Recent genetic findings, he said, “support an early deployment of modern humans eastward to Southeast Asia and Australasia, and so having art of a similar age is reasonable as well.”

The authors of the new study, a team from Australia and Indonesia, used a uranium decay technique to date the substance that encrusts the wall paintings — a mineral called calcite, created by water flowing through the limestone in the cave. The art beneath is presumably somewhat older than the crust.

Maxime Aubert and Adam Brumm, research fellows at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, and the leaders of the study, examined 12 images of human hands and two figurative animal depictions at the cave sites.

The researchers said the earliest images, with a minimum age of 39,900 years, are the oldest known stenciled outlines of human hands in the world. Blowing or spraying pigment around a hand pressed against rock surfaces would become a common practice among cave artists down through the ages — and even some of the youngest schoolchildren to this day.

A painting of an animal known as a pig deer, of the species babirusa, was determined to be at least 35,400 years old. The team concluded that it was “among the earliest dated figurative depiction worldwide, if not the earliest one.”

The closest in age from Western Europe is a painting of a rhinoceros from Chauvet Cave in France, dated at 35,000 years old, although some archaeologists have questioned that estimate. The most familiar rock art in the region of Sulawesi was created by the Aborigines of Australia, modern humans who arrived there 50,000 years ago. But none of the surviving rock art is older than 30,000 years.

The Sulawesi dates challenge the long-held view about the origins of cave art in an explosion of human creativity centered on Western Europe about 40,000 years ago, Dr. Aubert said, in an announcement issued by Griffith University.

Instead, he said, the creative brilliance required to produce the lifelike portrayals of horses and other animals much later at famous sites like Chauvet and Lascaux in France could have particularly deep roots within the human lineage.

But it is too soon to assess the discovery’s deeper implications, Wil Roebroeks, a specialist in human origins studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, wrote in a commentary accompanying the report. “Whether rock art was an integral part of the cultural repertoire of colonizing modern humans, from Western Europe to southeast and beyond, or whether such practices developed independently in various regions, is unknown,” he wrote.

“But what is clear,” Dr. Roebroeks continued, “is that no figurative art is known from before the time of the initial expansion of Homo sapiens into Asia and across Europe — neither from earlier H. sapiens in Africa nor from their contemporaries in western Eurasia, the Neanderthals.”

Dr. Conard, of Tübingen University, said he had long argued for what he calls polycentric mosaic modernity, in which similar kinds of cultural innovations happened in different contexts as modern Homo sapiens spread across the world and displaced archaic hominins.

“I have never thought that complex symbolic behavior has a single point source and that cultural evolutions is like switching a light on,’” he said. “One would expect different regions to have distinctive signatures and to contribute to the story in their own way.”

Dr. Delson, of CUNY, said he tended “to prefer the idea that art came as part of the ‘baggage’ of Homo sapiens as they spread into Eurasia, mainly as we know that so many of the cultural features once thought to have developed in western Eurasia in fact occurred far earlier in Africa.”

He cited the examples of early use of pigments and engravings in Africa, as well as bodily adornment with shells and advanced stoneworking technology.

In their report, Dr. Aubert and Dr. Brumm took no sides in the debate. “It is possible that rock art emerged independently around the same time and at roughly both ends of the spatial distribution of early modern humans,” they concluded. “An alternate scenario, however, is that cave painting was widely practiced by the first H. sapiens to leave Africa tens of thousands of years earlier.”

If that is the case, the Australian-Indonesian research team predicted, “We can expect future discoveries of depictions of human hands, figurative art and other forms of image-making dating to the earliest period of the global dispersal of our species.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Cave Paintings in Indonesia May Be Among the Oldest Known. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe